The Global Economy and the Nation-State

Abstract

Since talk of the globalization of the worlds economy began some 35 years ago, the demise of the nation-state has been widely predicted. Actually, the best and the brightest have been predicting the nation state s demise for 200 years, beginning with Immanuel Kant in his 1795 essay Perpetual Peace/' through Karl Marx in Withering Away of the State, to Bertrand Russell's speeches in the 1950s and 1960s. The latest such prediction by eminent and serious people appears in a book called The Sovereign Individually Lord William Rees-Mogg, former editor of the London Times and now vice chairman of the BBC, and James Dale Davidson, chairman of Britain's National Tax Payers' Union. Rees-Mogg and Davidson assert that for all but the lowest earners the Internet will make avoiding taxes so easy and risk less that sovereignty will inevitably shift to the individual, leaving the nation-state to die of fiscal starvation.